Translate your blog!

~ beetleypete

After reading on some other blogs about the new WordPress translate feature, I looked it up.

They have now provided a way for people all over the world to translate your blog into one of 100 languages. This is really easy too. All the reader has to do is to is choose their desired language from the drop-down menu, and the blog post is instantly translated into that. It is immediate, and happens as you watch, with no need to refresh the post.

And it’s free as well!

Go to your site admin dashboard. On the left menu, choose the paintbrush icon, ‘Appearance’. From the menu that appears, select ‘Widgets’. All the available widgets will be shown. Just choose the Google Translate widget, and drag and drop it to where you want it to appear in your sidebar from the list displayed. It appears immediately on your sidebar, next to any post, as a small Google icon, and a ‘Select language’ drop-down menu. I put mine right near the top, just under the search box. You can see it now, to your right. Try it out!

Once you have chosen a language to test, English will appear as an option on the language menu. Just click on that to return to your original display.

Your blog is now available to untold millions of more people, in their own language. Surely that can only be a good thing?

52 thoughts on “Translate your blog!”

  9. Thank you so much for posting this how Pete. I get views from other countries and while I suspect most of those come from people are at least bilingual this could prove very useful indeed. I saw it the other day on another’s site to translate their page for me but now I have it on mine thanks to you. These posts are always helpful for an amateur like myself.

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  13. Better than nothing I would say — of course I have it installed and it doesn’t seem to do a thing for my number of followers …. I have not added many followers since installing it —- I have not had commenters from foreign lands leaving comments on my blog — I guess it is alright though because it is interesting if nothing else.

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    1. Thanks, John. It was reading about this on your blog, and Chuq’s, that got me interested. I agree that better than nothing is a good description, but at least it is free, so what’s the harm?
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  14. It may be helpful to get a feeling for the content in a language totally unknown to you as a reader, but don’t count on the translator to do the job for you as a writer of a bilingual post, Pete. The more sophisticated your text is, the poorer the translaton, sometimes hilarious. Like M.L. writes, it’s alright for a simple structure only. We have tried it and many of our fellow countrymen too and we don’t use it because of the result. It’ll be interesting to hear what the other bloggers think about the translator though. 🙂
    Warm greetings from Norway,
    with a gentle pat for Ollie,
    Dina & co. c

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    1. Thanks for your thoughts, Dina. I did know that it was not always accurate, to say the least.
      See my reply to Marina (ML).
      I hope that you are continuing to enjoy the trip to your homeland.
      Love from Beetley, Pete and Ollie. X
      (Ollie patted!)

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  15. It’s worth pointing out that if you use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge as your browser then you can translate any page on the internet. Which is very helpful for a Brit in Poland 🙂 It’s far from perfect, but good enough to get the general feel of what’s said.

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  16. Permit me to be more doubtful, since I have yet to come upon an automatic translation that is any good in terms of ‘good’ writing. Providing a hint of the meaning is as far as it goes, and would probably work for something very simple and straightforward. Personally, I would not be interested in people coming upon one of my posts in very bad French or execrable German. Sorry to be a misery, Marina

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    1. You are not a misery at all, Marina. 🙂 I am aware that it has shortcomings. I have used it on some Chinese blogs, and some of the translations are almost like a comedy script. However, if it gives foreign readers some idea of what a blog is like, and makes them interested to use another translation platform to read more, then I doubt it will do much harm.

      I agree that it will not be much good for things like poetry and fiction, but (at least in French) it seems to make a reasonable translation of my own ‘everyday’ blog posts. I would file it under ‘better than nothing’, myself. I am sure it will also get better over time. Perhaps you could use it to translate this short post into Greek, and let me know where it falls down? That would be useful, and I will update the post accordingly.

      Thanks for your advice and comment, which is always appreciated.

      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. As you will see from other comments, Theo, this does struggle with some words and structure. I doubt your Sci-fi stories would translate too well, but it is certainly better than nothing, as far as I am concerned.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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      1. I would be surprised if it coped with limericks, David. It seemed to make a good go of my post in French, which is the only language I would understand anyway. The idea is for it to be handy, to save the reader having to translate the whole thing using a different platform.
        Best wishes, Pete.

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